St. Ives belongs to the same order as Catriona. It is accomplished and bad; a fact of which a recently published letter of Stevenson’s shows that he was fully and contritely aware. Skill marks it; the fable is poor and irregular; and the narrator is exceedingly unpleasant. It is worthy of remark that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who completed the book, is responsible for its most impressive and thrilling moments. Otherwise it shows the passive acceptance by Stevenson of his own bad convention, and it is fit only to be popular at the circulating libraries. It is even tedious, which is a sure passport to the suffrages of those who benefit by the circulating libraries.
The Master of Ballantrae, however, is a different affair. Here we have a story which, though it is broken and incomplete, has elements of noble beauty. It loses hold upon the reader in the middle, where there is a lapse of something like seven years; and the introduction of Secundra Dass is the ruin of the book as a work of art, although no doubt, as it supplies a new interest, it may have proved welcome to those reading for distraction. There are some few pieces of sheer greatness in the book, drawn with an economy and simplicity which separates them from the inferior portions as clearly as oil and water are separated. An instance may be found in the scene where Mr. Henry strikes the Master. It would be impossible to carry over in a quotation any hint of the effect which the next sentence, in its due context, has upon the reader:
“The Master sprang to his feet like one transfigured; I had never seen the man so beautiful. ‘A blow!’ he cried. ‘I would not take a blow from God Almighty!’”
In the book that moment seems in some extraordinary way to bring the scene leaping to the eye. The whole scene of the duel, and especially of its sequel, is fine. There are other scenes equally magnificent: even the climax, which is a collapse, does not blind us to the fact that we had been led, by the remarkable tension of the preceding narrative, to expect a poignantly tragical, and not merely a conventionally romantic, conclusion. But the climax throws up the weakness of the book, its rambling course, its wilful attempts to follow the wanderings of a central figure so fascinating to Mr. Mackellar (and to ourselves) as the Master, its lack of framework and true body of character. The Master is clear; Mr. Mackellar is nicely touched; the Chevalier de Burke is pleasantly farcical. In one scene, after the duel, Lord Durrisdeer and Mr. Henry’s wife seem to catch the infection of life into which the heat of excitement has thrown the whole book; but they are truly no more than puppets, and relapse before ever they have stood upright. Even the Master sometimes is no more than a collection of traits; and if the book were not so finely dressed it would assuredly cut a poorer figure. Its magnificent passages it is impossible to forget; its defects are so numerous, and so obvious to be seized upon, that it seems hard to insist that they are present. Nevertheless, they are the defects inherent in Stevenson’s romances.
VII
In three novels Stevenson collaborated with his stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. The first book, The Wrong Box, of which Mr. Osbourne claims to have written almost the whole, need not long detain us. Its amusingness is due to repetitions of phrase (e.g. “venal doctor,” which is the best of them), farcicality of scene, and easy variety of complication; but it does not succeed in being particularly amusing, after all, so that we may leave it safely among the novels enjoyably to be read in railway trains. The other two books, The Wrecker and The Ebb Tide, show much more clearly Stevenson’s hand. The former touches every now and then a number of his early experiences in France; and the manipulation is elaborate, wasteful, and ill-considered. But the book is engrossing. The Ebb Tide is to all seeming a short story, or rather, two related short stories, since it is under sixty thousand words in length, and is simplified down to certain swiftly successive incidents in the lives of four men. Both books are the result of experience in the South Seas; both seem to show, as far as it is possible for me to judge, a closer and truer (though a less heroic) understanding of men than heretofore. In another way, it may be said that we have been shown previously romantic figures, invented upon a quite well-recognised and comprehended basis of convention, doing certain things which were all in the game. Those who prefer this type of character will possibly say that the Master and Otto and Alan Breck belong to the grand style in literature, that style which gave us Medea and Prometheus and Lear. That may be so. It may be that in those novels which we have yet to consider Stevenson threw aside the grand style, which, as far as he was concerned, was the style of make-belief, the style of figure, trope, costume, and the picturesque. But, to me, Stevenson, in putting aside this grand style, which is an artificial style if it spring not from the very heart of the writer, came at last into the field of his experience and tried to show something of the world he had actually seen. That is why, to me, these last three novels of his are intrinsically the most interesting, because they were the most truly personal and original, of all that he wrote. They are faulty, and they show still at times the glister of picturesque romance; but Weir of Hermiston is widely recognised as Stevenson’s finest work, and the other two books have certain substantial merits which may well be dwelt upon here before we arrive at the general conclusions of this chapter.
The Wrecker, then, after a curious induction, begins with the education and the artistic career of Loudon Dodd, told with an amiable spirit, and convincing us by its sketches of various kinds of life. It then proceeds to San Francisco, where Dodd joins the famous Jim Pinkerton in wild-cat schemes. At last the story proper, or, if we may otherwise express it, the story exciting, begins with the sale of a wrecked ship “The Flying Scud.” Pinkerton and his ally, drawn into excessive bidding by the thought that only hidden opium can account for their opponent’s pertinacity, run the price up to fifty thousand dollars, the raising of which gravely endangers their credit in San Francisco, and at that price buy “The Flying Scud.” Dodd proceeds to the wreck. Meanwhile, Pinkerton becomes bankrupt; but Dodd inherits a small fortune. The “Flying Scud” is a frost. Dodd now plays detective upon the man who has tried to buy the “Flying Scud,” finds him and learns the history of the boat in its details. It has been said already (by Stevenson) that The Wrecker is more of a panorama than a romance, and “panorama” seems a very good description for the book. This kind of romance within other romances is written with greater purpose by Mr. Conrad, who, for all his arbitrary technical clumsinesses, convinces us more of the integrity of his narrative than Stevenson is able to do for The Wrecker in his elaborate explanatory epilogue. It reads as though it had been written with gusto, but with licence, as though the collaborators had not scrupled to give the tale its head. Its value to us now, however, is that it gives a good, clear, realistic picture of the life it describes. The Parisian portion is unexaggerated; the San Francisco chapters are vivid; the character of Pinkerton, broad though it is, has organic life; and the voyage in the “Norah Creina,” if it has not the poignant reality of Mr. Conrad’s descriptions of the sea, and, if it hardly bears comparison with them, has yet a bright excitement and rapid motion of great value.[1] Another point is, that the story was written, as Treasure Island was written, with simplicity and for the authors’ own delight. Our delight in it partly reflects their delight. Only partly, however, for our appreciation is due also to the ease with which experience—of San Francisco and of the South Seas—is here translated before our eyes into a romance that is as engrossing as its predecessors, and that retains its hold upon us without elaboration of pretence.
The Ebb Tide, although much slighter, is more firmly handled. It is in essence an anecdote; but it is closely and penetratingly seen; its power to transport us (as it were by Herrick’s imagined carpet) to the South Seas, and above all its quick unobtrusive rendering of a different moral atmosphere, combine to make it excellent work. If it is not moving (and very little of Stevenson’s work is moving) it is at least exciting and convincing within its natural limitations.
It is with Weir of Hermiston, however, that Stevenson reached the height of his powers as a realistic novelist. Excepting in the handling of Frank Innes, who might almost have been hired out among our dead writers of fiction as a professional seducer, the precision of Weir of Hermiston, the bite of Stevenson’s continuously vigorous imagination, is extraordinary. Continuity of narrative there is not: one must not demand it. But unfailing precision of imagination, a thing of great rarity, marks almost the whole of that portion of the book which we have; and is matched by the similar precision of the character drawing. Kirstie Elliott and the elder Weir are alike in the respect that they are together, even in the small compass of this fragment, the surest pieces of character created by Stevenson. The subsequent course of the fable of Weir of Hermiston, as described by Sir Sidney Colvin in his admirable note to the book, is terrifying to those who admire the fragment for its intrinsic qualities; but we will not seek too curiously into plans which might well have been severely modified in the writing. Certainly the first nine chapters show very few signs of romantic falsification; and if it were not for Frank Innes, the novelists’ hireling, we should be disposed to fear nothing for the future.